


Come Out, Virginia

by monimala



Category: General Hospital
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 08:03:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monimala/pseuds/monimala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in March 2012, while Maxie is cooling her heels in the PCPD lockup after confessing to killing Robin and Lisa. <i> She doesn’t think about all the people she’s lost...</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Out, Virginia

When she’s curled up on the holding cell cot --so thin it’s probably stuffed with cotton balls-- shivering under her coat, it’s not Robin that she thinks about. Or Georgie or Coop or Jesse or Uncle Tony and BJ. She doesn’t think about all the people she’s lost. She doesn’t even think about Lisa and that stupid story she told Mac and Spinelli. She thinks about herself. 

Because that’s the kind of person Maxie really is: selfish.

It doesn’t matter if everyone else sees the good in her, she knows they’re just being polite, just being nice, just talking the crazy person down off the ledge. They don’t realize that she’s been clinging to that ledge for dear life for years. Until her palms are raw, her shoulders sore in their sockets, and her fingers bloody from the effort. The reason her manicures are always perfect is because she constantly covers up the chips and the cracks. See, Maxie _survives_. When everyone better, everyone brighter, dies, she keeps on living. Because she puts herself first, above everything else. Because she’s shallow and hungry and desperate and she will _hang on_ at the cost of angels like Robin and her baby sister.

Maxie turns towards the wall, cinderblocks older than she is, and traces the graffiti. Dates, names, dirty comments about the cops who pace the squad room floor upstairs. Someone wrote, “Frisk me, Falconeri.” Another faded Sharpie scrawl says “Lucky lucky, wanna fucky?” It’s so awful she actually laughs. The sound is hysterical, like her voice at the funeral… high-pitched and demanding. It bounces off the wall and she bites down on her lip to make it stop. She bites until she tastes copper.

Lucky’s gone, too. Though, thank God, he’s actually alive. Probably safer now that he’s away from her, and away from that whiny bitch Elizabeth. Maxie almost ruined him. She nearly perverted something wonderful and kind and pure. It’s a good thing, a mercy, that she got all distracted with Matt and Spinelli last year, because she would’ve torn him apart all over again. She would’ve wrecked him, faked another pregnancy to try and replace Jake, told more lies about Elizabeth, and probably driven him right back to pills.

That’s the kind of person she really is: destructive.

Maxie is spiteful and shallow and mean and nasty. She’s too terrible to die. Like that Billy Joel song Mac always sang along to while burning dinner and hassling her to do her homework. Georgie never needed to be hassled. She had her homework done before leaving school property. She said “please” and “thank you” and never cheated on her boyfriend. She only had the one… and only the good die young.

Mac --and Maxie has to call him “Mac” here, in her head, because she’s not fit to call a saint like him “Dad”-- offered to bring her a change of clothes. She said “no.” Jail is not a Paris runway. She can wear this whore-red dress every day for the next month, be branded a Jezebel or whatever. Spinelli and Matt would probably be surprised she knows her biblical references. It’s not like she’s read it or anything, but she’s spent enough time in churches and chapels, at gravesides and headstones, that some of the bits and pieces have sunk in. Especially the parts about what gets you sent to Hell. Maxie’s done most of it. Deliberately. Happily. Without thinking of the consequences.

That’s who she is: a sinner.

She messes up over and over again, while other people pay the price. She gets to live. With the memories, the echoes, the crushed satin of the wedding dress Georgie never got to wear and the ballet flats BJ never danced in.

When it’s cold, dark, endlessly horrible and twice as lonely… when she’s trapped in a prison of her own lies, Maxie thinks of herself above all else. 

Because she’s the only one still here. The only one still breathing. And her stolen heart doesn’t have the courtesy to stop beating.

 

\--end--

March 31, 2012


End file.
